At Page One, we get a lot of questions about the importance of regularly adding content to clients’ websites. To many, it seems like a roundabout way to achieve a goal, with the goal being website traffic - and ultimately, if all goes well, conversions.
But did you know? According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing provides conversion rates about 6 times higher than other digital marketing methods.
Content marketing is not to be underestimated - there are so many valuable direct effects from the contribution of fresh content. To start, let’s review the basics: what content marketing is, the human experience, and the impact that content has on Google and SEO.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a digital marketing strategy focused on the creation and publication of content, with the primary purpose of driving new customers to your website. The goal is having relevant content reach a target audience to ultimately drive profitable action, aka conversions.
Content can come in many forms:
- Infographics
- Case Studies
- News articles
- White Papers
- Interviews
- Blog posts
- Videos
Basically, any piece of online media that is informative and relevant to your unique audience can be considered content marketing.
Human Perspective
Quality content can build trust with customers and potential leads alike by helping them to develop an opinion of your company. Providing valuable, educational content can help put you in an authority position as a leader within your industry.
From a user standpoint, the purpose of fresh content is to essentially generate new visitors - individuals who may not have sought out your products or services previously - while keeping old visitors coming back to your site. You want to keep them hooked! Consider websites such as news outlets or lifestyle bloggers - without frequent, updated content, no one would be bothered to visit those sites.
Your published content should remain pertinent to your industry and users. You want to be able to answer customer questions, share news, and remain an authority within your field.
Google’s Perspective
This is something we talk about often in the Page One office - Google truly rules the web! It is by FAR the most frequently used search engine and has a tremendous influence on how websites perform. We know from experience that Google prioritizes sites that have regular, fresh content. Of course, human users are crucial to engagement, but if you don’t prioritize how Google views your site, your human users may never actually even find you.
As content from a website is indexed by Google, it’s highly likely that the site’s ranking position improves, leading to increased prominence with users. Additionally, The more often you publish new content, the more additional opportunities you’re creating for search engines to crawl your site.
Impact of Content and SEO
If you’re familiar with SEO, you know that keywords tend to play a significant role in the algorithm ranking process for search engine indexing. Frequently adding quality content gives you the ability to optimize each published piece with relevant keywords that help guide targeted visitors.
In addition to creating opportunities for targeting specific keywords, fresh content pages also build new links for your website, referred to in the SEO world as “backlinks.” Backlinks are imperative to SEO, building credit with search engines who typically give more credit to sites that have a higher number of quality backlinks. These sites are considered to be more relevant by Google and other search engines.
One crucial thing to keep in mind: quantity of content is not the key here - quality content is.
Yes, updating frequently is extremely helpful, but not if your content is of poor quality - you can actually be penalized by Google for sketchy SEO practices such as stuffing keywords into your content to try and rank better.
Keep your standards high. Make sure your content is well-written, educational, and appropriately optimized to avoid penalization.
There you have it! Content marketing is an imperative facet of your digital marketing strategy and an investment that is worth your while. Want to learn more about the content marketing services we provide? Contact our experts at Page One Web Solutions today!
